Memories of Delhi in the 1950S
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Memories of Delhi in the 1950s Jatinder was born in Lyallpur, now Faislabad, in pre-Independence India. He finished his M.A. (English) from Delhi University in 1956, and went off to London to study Advertising in 1958. He passed his Membership Exam of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (M.I.P.A) in1965, and joined Rallis India in Bombay. Later, for over 20 years, he worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. Now retired, he helps his son in his ad agency in Delhi. Jatinder Sethi Editor’s note: Another version of this article first appeared http://www.apnaorg.com/articles/sethi-2/ Recently, I bumped into some very old college friends while roaming in the inner circle of Connaught Place (CP), New Delhi. More than 50 years ago, we used to stroll around CP after spending hours in the India Coffee House discussing everything under the sun. I had left Delhi in 1958, and had recently relocated myself in nearby Gurgaon after about 50 years. We decided to have dinner together in Delhi ‘O’ Delhi restaurant in the Habitat Centre. This restaurant was my first glimpse of people, many familiar faces from those days. There was a sugary crooner, singing melodies requested by the seemingly regular dinners. One of the requests, a gazal, transported me back to the Delhi of 1950s. I think quite a few of the diners were also taken back to old times. It was one of the most popular gazals of the 1950s, written by the Pakistani poet, Qateel Shifai, and sung by the famous Pakistani singer Iqbal Bano. ulfat kii na_ii ma.nzil ko chalaa, tuu baa.Nhe.n Daal ke baa.Nho.n me.n dil to.Dane vaale dekh ke chal, ham bhii to pa.De hai.n raaho.n me.n United Milk Bar and the Jukebox In those days, the only place that had a Juke-Box in Delhi was a milk bar (which is now a liquor bar and restaurant) called United Milk Bar, located right under the then Hindustan Times Office/Press opposite Scindia House. It was in this milk bar that I expressed my love and proposed to a contemporary of mine who was studying for her Masters in Philosophy, while I was studying for Masters in English. Our relationship was known to most of our friends at the Coffee House on Janpath. To play the jukebox, you had to insert a four anna (there were 16 annas in a rupee) coin, which was also the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola, or a cup of coffee at that time. Iqbal Bano’s ghazal was the most popular out of the 75 song options. We spent a lot of four annas there every day, out of our limited student budget. This milk bar, a nice decent place, was used to either meet one’s girl friend or listen to the music. However, the main haunt was India Coffee House. Everyone had a great sense of belonging to the India Coffee House in the 1950s. And for us students, the coffee house at Delhi University was also the meeting place after classes. The India Coffee House on Janpath Let me introduce some of the people who were the regulars at the India Coffee House on Janpath, and occupied their customary chairs on the appointed hour punctually at 10.30 in the morning - summer and winter. There were others, working in government offices, who came earlier and left by 9.30, after having their paan and cigarette. www.indiaofthepast.org Now imagine you are with me back in the 1950s, and we are going to the coffee house. We go past the two old paanwalla punditjis, sitting on their chowkis on either side of the entrance, with shining copper thaals full of paans and all the colourful ingredients, already serving their regular customers. There is another cluster of people outside, buying cigarettes at the shop under the staircase, on the right side of the door, and discussing politics while going to pick up their bicycles and away to work. (Bicycles were a common mode of travel for office workers and students at that time in Delhi.) As you push open the double door and enter, you see the place is already full, and sounds quite noisy. There is a cacophony of chatter, as everyone is talking at the same time. The inside hall is large and long, and goes right up to the kitchen entrance, from where a spiral staircase takes you to the balcony, which is rarely used by the regulars. The centre of the hall has a long row of tables with chairs around it, depending upon the number of people in each group occupying the table. The left side of the hall is lined up with small cabins, for the families, with curtains drawn. And, along the right side of the wall, there is a row of sofas with low long tables for large groups. The sofa seat in the centre of this row is of horseshoe shape, meant for a larger group. “Girilal Jain group” In practice, this horseshoe shape sofa was unofficially always left for a regular group, already sitting there. The head of the group, sitting in the centre, is nobody else but Girilal Jain, then the chief reporter of Times of India. He has about ten youngsters listening to his discourse in rapt silent, over cups of hot coffee. Later on, one saw a new member, a young lady who came into this group: Kamala Mankekar, wife of the then editor of Times of India, Delhi, who had also joined the staff of Times of India. Later on, Girilal Jain became Times of India’s London correspondent, and then Editor. In the early 1960s, I also happened to be in London at the same times as Girilal. I used to go to the Times of India’s office, as my place of work was quite close by, at lunch break to read the Indian paper, and sometime chat with him and have tea together. I left London in December1964 for Bombay. Coincidentally, in 1971, almost after 16 years, Kamala Mankekar joined as the Public Relations (PRO) head in the same organisation in Bombay where I worked, and we became good friends “I.K. Gujral group” The very first table in the centre row, as you entered the coffee house, was always occupied by a group, which included Inder Kumar Gujral, popularly called Inder; Surinder Nihal Singh of Statesman, more an Englishman than an Indian, with as tall a foreign wife; Inder Malhotra of Times of India, expert on Pakistan affairs; Rakshat Puri; Ajit Bhattacharjee (Rakshat and Ajit were two of the most serious people in this group), and Uma Vasudeva (known among us DU students as “303”!) They were always in serious political discussions, Inder Malhotra being the most animated and loudest. I never found out who paid for the coffee, perhaps they were always going Dutch. Both Nihal Singh and Inder Gujral (I don’t remember if he had a goatee at that time, which he grew after the visit of Russian leader Bulganin) would move into the individual family cabins once their wives arrived. Later on, Inder Gujral joined the kitchen cabinet of Indira Gandhi (India’s Prime Minister), and went on to become the Prime Minister of India! He stopped coming to the coffee house once he joined Indira’s cabinet. Nihal Singh, Ajit Bhattacharjee and Inder Malhotra, I believe, are still there and contributing to various newspapers. I am not sure about Rakshat Puri, whose younger brother, Rajinder Puri, writes a “Bulls Eye” column in the Outlook India. Rajinder Puri was occasionally part of our table of students and was trying to become a cartoonist at that time. ____________________________________________________________________________________2 www.indiaofthepast.org “Satinder Singh group” Satinder Singh (God rest his soul, he died at a young age), an expert on Akali and Communist politics, was a very well read man. He had a small blond beard, more like a stubble, quite tall with the loudest laugh in the coffee house, a high pitch voice, and a great argumentative Indian. Beside a few young journalists from the Indian Express and Hindustan Times, there were a few others from the vernacular press, and Krishan Malik, who was the Airport correspondent of Times of India. Krishan later became the London correspondent and never came back to India. As students, we never got invited to the lavish parties thrown by the American and Russian embassies in those days, but we always tagged along with Krishan Malik, who was a bachelor at that time and not attached with anybody then. He knew quite a few diplomats, and we gate crashed with him for free vodkas and whiskies. Malik was a happy-go-lucky jovial friendly chap. He is often on BBC television programmes these days, where he is invited as an expert on Indian affairs. He had a nice pad on the top floor of the coffee house building those days, which he shared with a diplomat from a South American embassy. Satinder Singh, a bachelor at that time, used to live in West Nizamuddin, while I was living in East Nizamuddin, staying with my family. I often went to his place for a drink. The deal was that I would bring the sodas, and. he would provide the whisky. Satinder later on got hooked to a young charming girl, who used to visit coffee house with her family and eventually got married after a long romance. Our evening meetings stopped after he got married, and I moved onto Bombay.